


pull and unwind

by audenrain



Series: you like to captain a capsized ship [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dirty Talk, Face-Fucking, Frottage, Hair-pulling, M/M, Mild D/s, Sub!Hamilton, dom!Laurens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-04 22:42:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5351114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audenrain/pseuds/audenrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there was one thing at which John considered himself more or less an expert, it was the study and understanding of Alexander Hamilton.</p><p>[in which Alexander can't seem to take care of himself, but John has an idea what he needs.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

apparently I'm now one of those people who only writes smut??

huge credit to Melanie, because this fic is a direct result of our texts and I would be nowhere without her brilliant mind. ❤️

also, partial credit to Anthony Ramos for calling LMM "baby girl" in [that one vine](https://vine.co/v/ODQgMUx1rza). it changed my life.

 

 = = =

 

If there was one thing at which John considered himself more or less an expert, it was the study and understanding of Alexander Hamilton. They’d only known each other just over a year, now – “Fifteen months!” Alexander had declared that morning, far too triumphant for a six am wake up call – but there was something about him that was achingly familiar, and John found himself reading his face like a poem: not without effort, but he followed his instincts, and he was nearly always rewarded.

Alexander liked to say, with a healthy dose of drama in his voice, that John knew his very soul. John had to pretend to laugh it off while Lafayette and Mulligan swooned and made kissing sounds, but it wasn’t a joke to him. And when he woke up that morning to Alexander’s face just inches from his, already wide-eyed and smiling, somehow there was nothing odd about it at all.

“Fifteen months, John!” Alexander said with an air of pomp. There was a paper cup by his cheek, radiating heat – coffee, by the smell of it. John struggled his way onto an elbow, propping himself up and wrestling his other arm out of the blankets to reach for the cup. Alexander surrendered it without a fight.

“What?” John said, once he’d had a sip and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“We’ve known each other exactly fifteen months today,” Alexander said brightly. “Well, that’s if you go by exact dates and ignore the fact that last year was a leap year, because – wait, I forgot the important part. Happy anniversary!” At that, he folded his arms on the edge of the bed and leaned in a little, expectant, or maybe just earnest. He had faint impressions on his forehead from the knitted hat he’d discarded, little creases of pink and white that John ached to smooth out with a thumb.

“I know you know fifteen months is not a real anniversary,” John said, taking another swallow of coffee. It was a little too bitter – John liked black coffee well enough, but Alexander took his with an extra shot of espresso dropped in, which was honestly an affront to the entire institution of caffeine consumption.

Alexander was still smiling. “Don’t worry, John, I didn't expect you to get me anything. No, keep it,” he said when John tried to hand back the coffee. “I’ve been up since four, and that’s my second cup. I have excellent news, though! Your letter’s going to be published after all.”

“What?” John sat up, leaning back against the wall and rubbing a hand over his eyes again. “But – Burr was adamant. He kept saying it was too divisive, too – angry—”

How the phrase “Black Lives Matter” could be a divisive statement, John would never know; but then, he wasn’t nearly as concerned as Burr about what the crusty old white men who ran nearly every law school in the country thought of his politics.

“Yes,” Alexander said, and spared a moment to roll his eyes. “But! Then he got a anonymous submission talking about how the Black Lives Matter movement marginalizes whites, and as I pointed out to him, if he publishes _both_ letters, he’s just presenting two sides of an argument.”

John blinked. “But that’s—”

“Oh, it’s terribly written. Practically incoherent.” Alexander waved a dismissive hand. “If it convinces anyone who’s not already a through-and-through racist, I’ll eat the whole newspaper. _Your_ piece on the other hand…”

“Alexander,” was all John could say, because _thank you_ seemed insufficient. Alexander’s smile had faded to something smaller, sweeter, a little crooked on one side, and John’s heart sighed. There were times – fleeting moments, really, gone before John had a chance to take a good look at them – when it seemed like Alexander’s heart might be sighing for him too, but then, Alexander was so full of passion that there was always something alight in his eyes.

“It’s an incredible piece, John,” Alexander said, shrugging and pushing himself to his feet. “It deserved to be shared.”

John wrapped both hands around the coffee cup. The cardboard was smooth, hot enough to be alive, and he ran a thumb in slow strokes down one side as he watched Alexander moving around the room, gathering books and notebooks and a truly hilarious amount of winter clothing.

“You just got back,” John pointed out.

“I’m headed to the library to study.” Which wasn’t really an answer. How long had Alexander even slept last night? Three hours? He had still been scribbling away around one in the morning, when John had shut his books for the night. “You can come, if you want.”

“Sure,” John said, although he could just as easily study from the warmth of his bed, and generally preferred to. But Alexander didn’t like to be too comfortable, John had noticed: he would never take a sofa if there was a chair instead, and he liked to stand rather than sit anyway. It was like he had the idea that comfort would make him lazy, as if even a small dose of luxury could lead to complacency.

(The only exception to this rule was warm clothing, because tropical-born Alexander had as much tolerance for the cold as a wet kitten, and would bundle himself up until he was a pair of big eyes blinking out of swaths of fleece and wool.)

It was ridiculous, but John still felt like he was brimming over a bit, thinking of the work Alexander had gone to – writing such an abhorrent letter, making it weak and sloppy, pestering Burr into publishing it – well, that part had probably been a reward more than anything – and he knew what Alexander wanted to hear more than a thank you. “Alexander,” he said, and Alexander looked over, in the process of wrapping a thick green scarf around his neck. “Happy anniversary.”

Alexander beamed at him until his smile disappeared behind a cable-knit wall.

 

 

 

Outside, the air was exactly as cold as John expected – enough that his nose stung a little and he wished he hadn’t left the last of Alexander’s coffee sitting on his bedside table – but it was a nice day, mostly sunny with a few soft gray clouds hovering at the edges of the sky, too far to be any threat. Alexander was talking from behind his scarf, which muffled the sound a little but did nothing to dull the fervor in his tone. He was ranting about some opinionated idiot in his Comparative Politics of Immigration class, and not that John _wasn’t_ listening, but—

“Hey,” he interrupted, and Alexander cut off like someone had pressed a mute button, although there was a little crease between his eyebrows. That was another thing that made John think, occasionally; he never had to work for Alexander’s attention. Sometimes it felt like Alexander was just waiting for John to ask. “When did you last eat?”

Alexander blinked, going for innocent but looking nervous instead. “I’m good,” he said, which might mean that he couldn’t specifically remember. John thought back to the previous night, when he’d wolfed down a midnight snack of hot-plate-cooked mac and cheese while Alexander had huddled in the corner around his textbooks and waved off every bite John offered.

“Nah,” said John, no longer asking. He looped an arm around Alexander’s shoulders and steered him away from the library and towards the student union building.

“Okay, _okay_ ,” Alexander said, sounding awfully petulant, as if he wasn’t leaning into John’s side a little, as if he hadn’t let himself be redirected by nothing more than a gentle tug. “Are you gonna hand-feed me, too?” he added, tilting his head to flutter his lashes up at John, who had to laugh.

“On our anniversary? Anything for my baby girl,” he said, cooing a little – and it was just a _joke_ , but it made Alexander trip over his own feet, sneakers scraping over the pavement as he lurched forward. John caught him easily, reeling him back into his side, and looked down to find that Alexander’s eyes – were on _fire_. They stood there a moment, frozen, Alexander half-turned into his chest and still leaning in so heavily that he would’ve toppled over without John to brace him.

“Alexander?”

Alexander blinked once, twice, and the fire settled to a simmer, still _something_ , something that made John’s throat tight, but when he spoke he sounded perfectly normal. “I’m fine,” he said, straightening a little. “I probably do just need some food.”

 “Am I gonna have to carry you there, man?” he asked, nudging at Alexander’s shoulder a little. It provoked a laugh, but also a little shiver, and – looking at the layers and layers wrapped around Alexander’s delicate frame – he couldn’t imagine how it could be caused by the cold.

 

 

 

It became a pattern. John was beginning to realize that it wasn’t that Alexander didn’t have an appetite – his stomach would growl but he’d just ignore it unless someone else (John) heard – or that he didn’t get tired – John caught him clenching his jaw against a yawn several times a day. Alexander was just incapable of taking care of himself. Incapable, or completely unwilling, or maybe a little of both.

“Eat,” John would tell him, stern, unrelenting until Alexander took the fork from him and shoveled in enough food to keep him going through the next passionate debate or six-hour study session.

“Sleep,” John would tell him, shoving at his shoulder until Alexander let himself be pressed back into the thin mattress and tucked in, insisting that he wasn’t tired yet but falling asleep within a few minutes of his head touching the pillow.

“Stop,” John would tell him, gentle but firm, when he could see Alexander getting too far into his own head. He got like that sometimes, late at night, drumming his fingers on his desk and tapping his foot, staring at the page in front of him like it had answers he could unlock if only he _panicked_ enough.

“Hey,” John would say, and Alexander turned to him like a needle pointing north.

And it was like that that he became more and more aware of Alexander’s receptive nature. There was no other word for it – Alexander came alive in his hands, twitching beneath the lightest of touches to his shoulder, arm, side. Once, coming out of a bar, both of them a little tipsy and Alexander just a bit less steady on his feet, John put a hand low in the small of his back – it was a guiding touch, but it was also a question of sorts – and Alexander made a wordless sound that answered it in full.

It was that night that John first kissed him, just around the corner from their dorm, alcohol buzzing warm in his blood and Alexander moaning hot into his mouth, the side of his throat thrumming underneath John’s palm. It was Alexander who tugged at his coat and stepped back, back, back until they were against the wall and John’s body was crowding Alexander up against the cold cement; it was John who took the hint and pressed harder, shoved a thigh between Alexander’s legs and dragged his teeth over Alexander’s tongue like he was going to devour him whole.

 

 

 

John had always been a devoted student: the analysis of Alexander Hamilton was no different. It was a science, really, and one that required hypotheses and tests. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he didn’t even have to perform them himself.

“You are a menace,” Burr said, one day in the cafeteria when Alexander – after greeting him with the usual _Mr. Burr! Sir!_ – the politest form of provocation John had ever witnessed – had spent nearly an hour grilling him on financial politics. “Will somebody please gag him?”

It was to the table at large, and Lafayette and Mulligan howled with laughter, but they missed the way Alexander’s breath hitched and his leg jerked. John looked at him, and he was tense as a bowstring, and when John risked a hand on his thigh, fingers spread dangerously wide, Alexander looked over at him with black, shining eyes.

 

 

 

Some things he figured out by accident. He gave a teasing pull on Alexander’s ponytail, and got a squeak in response - a high shocked noise that Mulligan mocked for days, thinking it was a sound of pain, because he didn’t know how to read that flare in Alexander’s eyes the way John did. John kept quiet, and tucked it away in his mind, another addition to the list of ways he knew he could take Alexander apart, piece by piece.

But not yet.

 

 

 

Exams came, and Alexander threw himself into them just as he had the last two semesters: with a vigor that bordered on downright dangerous. The campus grew quieter and then emptier as students trickled off home for the holidays, the temperature dropped even further, and John watched as Alexander seemed to do his best to have a nervous breakdown. Most days, he had to cut Alexander off caffeine by three o’clock – Alexander would protest, but when John took the cup away his fingers were slack and shaking and he looked at John with something like relief.

They were both too exhausted and stressed to do much over that two week period, but Alexander had all but stopped sleeping in his own bed, even though both their mattresses were twin-sized. At night, when John decided he’d done enough for the day, he crawled into bed and lay on his side, back pressed against the wall, so that when Alexander finally decided the same, there was a clear invitation. They went to sleep like that, his arms around Alexander’s middle and his face in Alexander’s hair, but some mornings they woke to find Alexander on top of him, face tucked into his neck, body curled up in the cradle of John’s arms.

Generally, Alexander spent a lot of time trying to seem taller. He stood as often as possible – especially if whoever he was talking to was sitting down – and he stood like he had a plank strapped to his back. When he had to look up to meet someone’s eyes, he did it with resentment all over his face. Which was why it amazed John that he seemed to do the opposite when they were together. He rounded his shoulders to better fit himself into John’s side when they walked; he ducked his head when they hugged so that if John tilted his chin up a little he could rest it on Alexander’s dark hair; when John pinned him against walls, he slid down a little, hooking an arm around the back of John’s neck to pull him down; and when John finally took the plunge the day after Alexander had his last exam and pulled his hair on purpose, it was like he’d touched a live wire.

Alexander had slept a full night and well into the morning – an incredible feat, for him, and so John had lain there messing around on his phone for three hours with the dense warmth of Alexander’s body on his and the heat of Alexander’s morning wood on his thigh. He tried not to think about that, because it had been at least a week since they’d done anything more than kiss, and he was still half-hard himself, but Alexander needed sleep more than anything else in the world right now.

He felt it when Alexander woke – a flutter of eyelashes against his skin, a twitch of the hand curled lightly around his side – and he bent his leg to rub a socked foot against Alexander’s ankle. “Hey.”

“What time is it?” Alexander asked, in a voice that said he knew he wouldn’t like the answer.

He tossed his phone facedown on the floor by the bed and locked his arms around Alexander when he tried to reach for it. “Did you forget the part where we’re on vacation?”

Alexander was quiet for a moment. “When do you go home for Christmas?”

“Not till the twenty-third. Now stop trying to read the time through the back of my phone and just relax a minute. You don’t have anywhere to be.”

Alexander tucked his face back into the base of John’s neck and sighed. “I could be working on that article about th—”

John tugged on his hair, once, sharp and quick, and Alexander’s voice broke off into a shocked sound – and for a moment John had a flash of worry, and opened his mouth to apologize – but then Alexander rolled his entire body down with a groan, his hands tightened hard on John’s hips.

“You don’t have anywhere to be,” John said again, and Alexander was breathing hard, pressing himself as close as possible.

“Yeah,” he said. “John—”

John wove a hand into his hair again, a slow, silent question, and Alexander lay there on top of him, every muscle taught, a harp waiting to be plucked.

“ _Yeah_ ,” he said, and John tugged again, and Alexander moaned through gritted teeth.

“If it stops being good,” John said, even though he knew they really should’ve talked about this before, really should stop and do it now – but Alexander was starting to _writhe_ against him – “say ‘Jefferson’ and we stop.”

Alexander giggled, a little hysterical. “Yeah, that’d be a – mood-killer – _fuck!”_

John rolled him over – a dangerous maneuver only made possible by the bracing presence of the wall on one side, but he managed – and gave a good yank to Alexander’s hair, this time. Alexander’s moans grew higher, thinner, and he looked up at John with the most imploring look in his big eyes, and if John was a more patient person he’d have done this bit by bit, but he’d pretty much used up all his patience waiting for exams to finish, waiting for an Alexander that would melt in his arms the way he knew he could.

“You have the prettiest hair,” John murmured, stroking a thumb over where it was softest at his temples. “You know that, baby girl?”

Alexander made a soft, quavering noise, and then he dove up to kiss John, straining against the grip of John’s hand in his hair. He was too wound up to last long, arching up into John’s thigh between his legs and grinding with desperation, until John took pity on him and slid a hand into his boxers.

“You worked so hard this semester,” John said, working one hand over Alexander’s cock in quick firm pulls. He nipped the edge of Alexander’s jaw, tightening the hand in his hair till his head tipped further back and bared his throat to John’s mouth. “Too hard, really. But that’s just who you are.”

“I – I have to work harder, harder than anyone else, I—”

John nipped him again – not a reprimand but a silent _hush._ Alexander did. “You worked so hard, baby,” he said again. Alexander’s hips stuttered up into his hand and his throat leaped beneath John’s mouth as he whined, a wordless plea. “You can take a break.”

Alexander came into his hand with a breathless sob. John followed against his thigh with just a few quick thrusts, and Alexander – boneless, still shaking – watched him, dark eyes shining with gratitude.


	2. Chapter 2

thank you all so much for your kind words on the first half of this! I want to put up a minor warning for this chapter that it deals a little with anxiety. nothing super heavy, and it’s looked at from an outside perspective so hopefully it shouldn’t be too raw, but I don’t want to mess with anybody’s state of mind! take care of yourselves, lovelies.

more gratitude to Melanie, this time for rescuing me from turtle-naming indecision – and more importantly for her unwavering support and incredible feedback.

 

= = =

 

It wasn’t that John genuinely didn’t think Alexander could take care of himself for a week. Alexander had been on his own for a lot more of his life than John liked to think about, and he was a whole lot tougher than he looked. John had even seen him in a fight – he was vicious, a scrapper with a shocking strength coiled in his wiry limbs. But John had seen him in the aftermath, too, pretending his nose wasn’t leaking a steady trickle of blood, letting himself get talked into having another beer instead of going to get an icepack and some tissues.

And, okay, maybe John had helped start that fight. But at least he was usually sensible enough to tend to his wounds a bit afterwards.

Honestly, if John thought he could get away with it, he wouldn’t be going home for Christmas at all. It wasn’t going to be anything like a vacation. Completely aside from his worries about Alexander, completely aside from his selfish desire not to be apart from him, it was going to be a shitty six days, and if it wasn’t for the fact that his dad was paying his tuition, he’d be spending Christmas in his dorm.

As it was, this was a reduced sentence. The whole of winter break was fourteen days, and it was only by insisting that he needed to get a start on the readings for next semester that he’d talked his dad down to six. He knew what it would be like: mass on Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning, introductions to any eligible young women new to the congregation, a lecture about forgetting some of the words to the hymns (because he would, he always did), an interrogation on his precise GPA (and how each of his grades compared to each class average), and a good dose of heavy skepticism about whether some of these electives ("Comparative Vertebrate Zoology?”) were _really_ all that useful for pre-law. Pretending, as he’d done ever since he’d gotten his acceptance letter, that law really was his intended path. Wondering how long he could keep up the ruse, and how likely it was that he’d be cut off when the whole thing collapsed.

But he had five days before he had to make the drive down to balmy South Carolina. Right now, Alexander was curled into his side, chewing on the drawstring of his hoodie, doing as John had told his dad he would be – getting a head start on a book for a class that hadn’t even started yet – and letting John comb his fingers through his hair. At times John pressed a little into his scalp, dragging his nails a bit, and Alexander would hum, low in the back of his throat, the closest John had seen a human come to purring. John’s shoulders were starting to ache from where they pressed against the cheap headboard, but Alexander felt too good against him to shift positions.

“I’m never going to get through this chapter if you keep doing that,” Alexander sighed, even as he tilted his head forward, encouraging the progress of John’s hand.

“Oh, no,” John said, smiling. He let his hand fall a little further this time, scratching lightly down the back of Alexander’s skull and over the back of his neck, across the notches of his spine. Alexander gave the tiniest shudder. “You’ll only be one unit ahead of everyone on the first day, then, instead of two. That’s a shame.”

“I’m not done the first unit yet. That’s the end of this chapter.” There was a note of irritation creeping into Alexander’s voice, so John let it drop. Instead he fiddled with the ends of Alexander’s hair, because it was clean and soft and not everything he did was selfless (he could smell Alexander’s shampoo, something warm and a little spicy). That seemed to be less distracting, enough at least that Alexander fell silent again. John missed the sort-of purring.

 

 

 

Alexander purred for him again, later, though, and it was even better then – with Alexander’s arms around his hips and hands curled into desperate fists in the small of his back, pulling him deeper into Alexander’s mouth. John scratched his fingers down Alexander’s scalp again and the pleased hum it drew out made Alexander's throat vibrate all around him.

“Fuck,” John choked out, his hips jerking a little before he caught himself. Alexander hummed again, trying to take him in deeper, even through there were tears starting at the corners of his eyes and he was shaking with effort.

They were going to be so late. Lafayette was already at the bar - the only other friend of theirs who had to stay on campus over the holidays - and John was going to have to buy him _so_ many drinks before he’d let this go. He’d _know_ what they’d been doing, John was certain of it. He’d already left marks all down the side of Alexander’s neck, Alexander’s hair was a _mess…_

John rolled his shoulders back against the wall, shutting his eyes against the incredible sight of Alexander’s clever mouth stretched around his cock. He needed to be the one in control, the one with enough strength not to just push forward with abandon, no matter how much he wanted – someone had to remember that Alexander had to _breathe_ –

He sank his hand into Alexander’s hair and used it to pull him off, and it took all his strength just to hold him there. “ _Alexander._ ”

Alexander leaned forward, still tethered by John’s hand, to press his open mouth to John’s hip, biting, sucking, _humming_ , and it buzzed through his teeth and into John’s bones and just the thought of that on his cock again made his hands tighten, and _that_ made Alexander moan for real, looking up at him through damp lashes.

“John,” Alexander said, and his voice was hoarse and hungry and he may as well have been saying _come on_.

John took his other hand from the wall and cradled the back of Alexander’s head, guiding Alexander back to his cock. Alexander slid back down, fighting every reflex until John was so deep he wondered, if he touched Alexander’s throat, could he feel—?

Alexander pulled back until he held just the head on his tongue, sucked a slow laboured breath through his nose, and looked up at John with heavy, sweet expectation.

John pushed forward into the wet heat of Alexander's mouth, hands still curled over the back of his head, holding him right there, and Alexander’s eyes fluttered shut with a choked whine like he was receiving benediction. John tried to move carefully, tried to measure his thrusts, but Alexander kept letting out these noises, these senseless sounds of bliss that barely made it out around the weight of John’s cock in his mouth, and he was rolling his _own_ hips up into empty air, as if the faded denim was tight enough to give him any kind of relief. John knew he was moving a little too fast for comfort now, but Alexander was tilting his head to receive it like he was deepening a kiss, and his hands were still a faint pressure on John’s back: he was making no move to tap out the rhythm they’d worked out as a backup, for when Alexander’s mouth was stopped. (Alexander _really_ loved having his mouth stopped.)

John pulled him off, just for a moment. “Breathe, baby,” he said, even though it was hard to follow his own advice when Alexander tipped his head back, panting, and he looked so goddamn _good_ with his reddened lips and bright, bright eyes. He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, dragged his teeth over it, licked his lips, straining against John’s hand, and John let out a helpless little laugh as he let Alexander swallow him back down to the root.

“You’re so good for me, baby girl,” John sighed, pushing forward into the sound of Alexander _groaning_ at that, a groan that came from deep in his chest. He scrunched his eyes shut and hollowed his tongue even further and the sound kept going until John hit the back of his throat, and _oh._ Alexander really did like that. His nails were digging into the skin of John’s lower back where his shirt had ridden up, and then scraping down over his ass, pulling his jeans even lower down his thighs, and god, he was like a feral cat, sometimes, his mouth so soft and welcoming but the rest of him _wild._ John wanted to kick off his jeans and tear off Alexander’s, too, pull the _Columbia U_ sweatshirt over his head and mess his hair up even more, come on his face and clean him off and suck another bruise into his neck because there was an untouched spot underneath his ear, and he would smell like sweat and soap and like John—

“Alex,” he gasped out, the rare nickname slipping out in his desperation. He liked Alexander’s name, the laborious way it tripped off the tongue and the majesty of its history. Alexander looked up at him, letting himself be held still, his tongue flexing against the underside of John’s cock, pressing the head to the soft palate of his mouth.

“I’m gonna come,” John managed, and he loosened his hold enough to let Alexander pull off, if he wanted, because they hadn’t discussed—

Alexander arched one eyebrow at him, _impressively_ insolent considering his mouth was too full to talk, and for the first time he took his hands away from John’s back, reaching up to tighten John’s grip in his hair again, and – okay, John could take a hint. He squeezed at the roots till fresh tears came to Alexander’s eyes, and rode out the vibrations of Alexander’s helpless moan, and came with whispers of _baby girl, your mouth, baby girl, oh my god,_ and Alexander didn’t let spill a single drop.

John's knees shook. His heart - his heart might never beat at a normal pace again.  _Jesus_.

He sank down to sit in front of Alexander, gathering him onto his lap and opening his mouth to ask how he could take care of Alexander, when he realized it was a little too late.

“Shut up,” Alexander said, burying his face in John’s neck, like John was going to _tease_ him for it. Like John’s dick wasn’t doing its best to get hard again just at the thought of Alexander coming from nothing but the friction of his jeans and John filling his mouth.

“Your pants, though,” John pointed out, rubbing a palm over the growing wet spot in them. Alexander shuddered, still softening.

“Shit.”

When they finally made it to the bar, they were forty-five minutes late. Alexander was wearing a pair of John’s chinos, which had to be rolled up at the ankles and which hung low on his hips – “it’s laundry day!” Alexander had hissed – and Lafayette took one look at them and rolled his eyes so far back into his head it must’ve hurt. He made John buy every one of his drinks that night, and it was absolutely, entirely worth it.

 

 

 

(“Just be careful,” Lafayette had said, late in the evening when Alexander had stumbled off to the bathroom.

“With what?” John asked, drawing in the condensation on his beer glass. Lafayette put a hand on his arm, stopping his hand and drawing John's full attention.

“With this,” he said, nodding in the direction Alexander had gone. “You feed him, you make him take naps, you boss him around – I know he likes it but you can’t let him get too used it it.”

John stiffened, leaning back in the booth, the pleasant haze of alcohol fading into sharp indignation. “You think I’m going to abandon him?”

“ _No_ ,” Lafayette replied, leaning in and lowering his voice. “I think he already has enough trouble asking for what he wants when it’s not an internship or a feature in the paper. He doesn't ask you to take care of him. Does he? You just—”

“ _I_ need another drink,” Alexander announced, sliding back into the booth with a bright smile, too tipsy to be aware of the tension in the air.

Lafayette shot John one last, significant look, and then got up to go put another round on their tab.)

 

 

 

John couldn’t shake it. He wanted to spend his last few days here doing nothing but fucking and cuddling and drinking and pretending that nothing unpleasant even existed, nothing outside the way Alexander looked at him, but – Lafayette wasn’t wrong.

Alexander didn’t _talk_ about it, not the way they needed to be able to. Sometimes, John would poke a little too much at him while he was working, and he’d shoot John a look or his shoulders would twitch and most of the time John knew to drop it. That day before the bar wasn’t the first occurrence, and it certainly wasn’t the last. Really, it was inevitable that he’d slip up sometime.

“Your hand’s gonna fall right off if you keep on writing like that,” he was teasing, trying to get Alexander to go outside and have a snowball fight or something, anything to get some fresh air. Alexander didn’t look up from the notebook balanced on his knees. To be fair, he had already compromised a little, moving from his desk chair to the bed to sit with John, who was reading a novel.

“I’ve been teaching myself to write with my left, lately,” Alexander said absently. “Just in case.”

John couldn’t even tell if that was a joke.

“Alex _an_ der,” he implored, resting his chin on Alexander’s shoulder. He felt the twitch, but he tried to take the pen right out of Alexander’s fingers, anyway. That – he knew as soon as he did it – was a mistake.

Alexander burst to his feet, nearly tripping over the bedsheets but dodging John’s hand when he reached out to help. “Fuck you,” he snarled, zero to sixty in an instant, and John put up his hands in surrender.

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. Alexander, _wait_ -" Because Alexander was gathering up his coat and scarf and backpack, clearly preferring to finish his work in the library than be around John for another instant. "This just in: I cannot read minds.”

Alexander tossed his notebook onto the desk with a mighty slap. “What does _that_ mean?”

“I just need you to talk to me,” John said. “You gotta lay it out for me.”

“Lay _what_ out, why I don’t want you snatching the pen right out of my hand—?”

“What you need. What you like. What you _don’t_ like. I try to figure you out, but it’s – for a guy who spends most of his waking hours giving his opinions on things you don’t really talk about what’s going on in your head, you know?”

Alexander stared at him, hard, for so long that John almost, almost started to squirm.

“Okay,” Alexander said, and heaved a sigh, letting the rest of his things slide to the ground. He twisted his hands in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie. There was a wildness in his eyes of an altogether different kind than usual – it was unfocused, not a hunger to absorb or compel but to lash out. “I _don’t_ like it when you mock me for working hard. I don’t like it when you forget that I don’t have somebody to pay tuition for me, and that if my GPA slips even a fraction— And I _don’t_ like it when you talk like everything’s going to work out for me just because I’m naturally intelligent. I am really _fucking_ intelligent, but the only way I’ll get to make a difference with that intelligence is if I work harder than anybody else around me. I don’t have connections, or the money to make them. All I have is my brain, and I need to keep feeding it, I need to get good at everything I possibly can so that the day there’s something that needs doing and I manage to holler just loud enough to be heard, I have the skills to be the man for the job. I need to be – to be unimpeachable, to be so good they _have_ to notice me. Because I’m never gonna be the nephew of their old college buddy.”

John listened, and hoped he was doing it with a neutral face, because it _hurt_ , the idea that Alexander thought of him like that: a rich kid with somebody paying his tuition. It hurt to think that Alexander had felt mocked; that John had made him feel like that. And it hurt that Alexander needed to be standing like that, when he’d been so sweetly curled against John just moments before; that Alexander had his hands in fists pressed against his stomach like he was shielding himself.

“And trust me,” Alexander said, quieter now. There was an awful note of pleading in his voice, like he was begging John to understand. “You don’t want to hear what’s going on in my head most of the time.”

“I do,” John argued, and then backtracked. “I’m sorry.” That seemed like a better place to start. “I was never making fun of you – or – I never meant to, anyway,” he amended, when Alexander’s whole face shifted into that familiar expression of his that always meant _first of all, asshole._ “I didn’t think about it like that. I thought we agreed – at least, I thought you could see that you need somebody to make you take a breath, sometimes.”

“Maybe,” Alexander said, although it looked like it physically pained him to get the word out. His eyes were fixed hard somewhere over John’s shoulder, on the bare white plaster of the wall. “But I need somebody to do that without making me seem stupid for… forgetting to breathe.”

“You’re not,” John breathed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, wanting _so much_ to get up and go to him. But Alexander’s chin was tilted up, and his shoulders were so straight and his spine so tall. John stayed where he was. “I’m sorry. God, Alexander, you are not stupid.”

Alexander’s gaze snapped to him then, a look of affront on his face. “ _I_ know that,” he said, and John bit down on a laugh.

“Well, I know it too. I’m sorry if it seemed otherwise.”

Alexander stared at him, starting to soften at the edges. “I do need you,” he admitted, his shoulders dropping the tiniest fraction. “I don’t know where I’d be without you. Probably all my hair would fall out.”

“Don’t _say_ that,” John burst out, pure reflex. Alexander grinned at him.

“And I like it,” he added, dropping his head down and then forcing himself to look back up at John with shy, heavy-lidded eyes. “That you’re not afraid to push. It’s… I need that too.”

John held his gaze, solemn. “I can push,” he agreed, pitching his voice low just to watch Alexander swallow hard. Still, he didn’t get up. Pushing, he could do; but pulling was important too. Alexander stood there a minute, one foot more forward than the other, shifting his weight back and forth and watching John’s face like he was reading whole paragraphs in it.

Finally he took a step forward, and then two more, until he could sit next to John on the edge of the bed, the sheets pooled on the floor around their ankles. “And I’ll try and be better about telling you when you push too hard.”

“I just want to help make it quiet in there,” John told him, touching a fingertip to Alexander’s temple, smoothing a thumb over the dark circle beneath Alexander’s eye.

Alexander’s mouth twisted, a rueful attempt at a smile. “It’s never quiet in here,” he said, but he reached up and grabbed John’s wrist when John started to pull away, held him there and molded his hand to Alexander’s face. “But you make it awfully close.”

They were both quiet for a moment, John feeling Alexander’s pulse through the thin skin of his temple, Alexander probably able to feel his too, still holding his wrist.

“I always feel like we know each other so much better than we do,” Alexander said, soft and wondering. “Isn’t that strange? There’s actually an awful lot we don’t know about each other.”

John shrugged, sliding his hand down to the back of Alexander’s neck and reeling him in to his side. Alexander went, pliable, tipping his head onto John’s shoulder. “We can fix that,” John suggested.

Alexander considered, tapping out a rhythm on one of John’s shirt buttons, because he could never ever just lie still. “You don’t have any pets,” he said, in a voice that said he was _pretty_ sure he remembered that right. John hummed in agreement. “Did you ever want any?”

John hesitated. “I always kind of wanted a turtle.”

There was a brief pause, and then Alexander dissolved into snickers. “A _turtle_ ,” he echoed, muffling his laughter in John’s chest.

“I think they’re cool! There’s a turtle colloquially known as the pancake turtle. Tell me a little bit of you doesn’t want to be able to say ‘This is Michelangelo, my pancake turtle’!”

“Michelangelo?”

“No, you’re right, I’d call him Hamilton. The male pancake turtle,” he went on, cringing away from Alexander’s hand thumping down on his chest in retaliation, “is typically smaller than his counterpart, with a deceptively fragile appearance due to his soft-looking shell, but he – _ow_ – can actually be quite aggressive, with a dangerously powerful bite—”

Alexander bit down on the notch of his collarbone; John pulled his hair; and the conversation was abandoned for a while in favour of exploring just how hard Alexander could bite, and what exactly John was going to do about it.

 

 

 

“Take care of yourself.” John touched the tip of his nose – already freezing from a few minutes in the open air – to Alexander’s and held him close, gloved hands in fists around the lapels of his peacoat.

“I’ll be fine,” Alexander assured him. “You’re going to hit rush hour if you wait any longer.”

“I know,” John said, and kissed him, sucked on his lower lip and chased the taste of hot chocolate on his tongue. Alexander put up no fight at all, leaning back against the driver’s side door of John’s car and hooking a foot around John’s ankle.

“I mean it, though,” John added when they finally pulled away (and shit, but the air was like ice where Alexander had been kissing him). “If I come back and all you’ve eaten are protein bars…”

“Give me some credit,” Alexander said. “There’s still half of that bag of Doritos left.”

“ _Alexander._ You’re going to eat some real food. Right?”

Alexander hooked his fingers in John’s scarf and pulled him down for one more kiss. “Remind me?”

John pretended to adjust Alexander’s beanie, just to smooth his hands down the length of his hair afterwards. “I’ll call every night.”

 

 

 

(They were not, all of them, strictly innocent conversations. If nothing else, that Christmas John learned just how quiet he could be, lying on his childhood bed with his old stuffed animals pushed to the back of the closet so they couldn’t watch him coming into his fist, chewing through his lower lip, as Alexander whimpered in his ear.)

 

= = =

 

John Laurens [really did like soft-shelled turtles](http://john-laurens.tumblr.com/post/130475269483/whats-the-deal-with-john-laurens-and-turtles)! I'm dramatizing here obviously but I thought that was too cute not to incorporate. some of his illustrations of them were published in a scientific journal! he had a strong interest in medicine and biology, and only ended up becoming a lawyer at his father’s urging. poor John.

thank you all so much for all the nice comments and kudos and love! hopefully the conclusion was worth the wait.


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